


As Two Girls

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: F/F, Female Friendship, Pre-Canon, Princesses, well sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-19 23:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11908422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: They spoke sometimes as princesses and neighbors, sometimes as a worldly elder instructing a naïve junior in the wretched ways of the world. And sometimes, miraculously, they spoke to each other as two girls who were, almost, friends.





	As Two Girls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pendrecarc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/gifts).



> I present this treat story to Pendrecarc as a small token of my appreciation for initiating and running this exchange, which has given me so much joy and inspiration two years in a row! I'm sure I speak for all of us when I express my gratitude for all the brilliant new contributions to the fandom that have come about thanks to this challenge. Thank you for all that you do!

"Me?" Helen asked, lifting her chin. "Why me?"

Her uncle shifted his weight, glancing at her father, who frowned, and Helen gave a short sigh through her nose. Clasping her hands behind her back she spoke again, more politely. "Surely one of my older cousins would be a more fitting companion for her highness, sir?"

"More fitting in many ways, surely," her uncle said with a pointed look at the grass and mud that stained one side of her smock from where she'd taken a tumble off her pony earlier. Helen lifted her chin again and stubbornly refused to blush. If Gen was hiding anywhere in earshot she wouldn't hear the end of his father's comment for weeks.

The king of Eddis lifted his hand, and both his minister of war and his daughter turned to him. "The envoy from Attolia will arrive tomorrow. You will be at my side to greet them, Helen, and to make the princess Irene feel at home in our country. That will be all."

Helen bowed and left the audience chamber, waiting until she was outside in the hall to begin muttering to herself.

 

Although the Attolian princess was only a few years older than herself, Helen knew that anyone looking at them side by side would see a child and an elegant lady, at odds in every way.

Pylaster had laughed when he caught sight of her, stalking through the entrance hall in a gown stiff with embroidery. As they arranged themselves beside their father in the courtyard, Pylaster had leaned around Lias to say in a whisper that she would be doing him a favour if she kept that scowl on her face; the lowland princess would be frightened away, saving him the trouble of marrying her. Helen tried to pinch him, they both jostled Lias, and were treated to one of their father's famous glares that made him look like the sky god, ready to throw thunderbolts. Only the Attolian party drawing into earshot saved them from a scolding in a voice to match.

Greetings were exchanged with a lot of ceremonial nonsense, and Helen used the time to watch the other princess surreptitiously. They'd met only once before, two years ago, during a visit to Attolia. Helen had been so excited to meet her that she'd barely slept the night before they set out for Ephrata, where the child was sequestered for the summer months. She'd left the coastal town with a very different idea of the princess than she'd arrived with and now, as she offered Irene the wine cup, she was met with the same distant look that she remembered although Irene had grown so tall that to call her a child seemed foolish.

Once everyone on all sides had been thoroughly greeted, Helen escorted the princess and her retinue to their suite of rooms, called her 'sister' and avowed that every comfort of her home was at their disposal, waited until the door closed behind them with a firm click, and fled.

"Truly," Xanthe scolded later as she was helping Helen change for dinner, "I've seen better-behaved children roaming the gutter. What must the Attolians think of you?"

"We don't care what they think," Helen said, setting her jaw against Xanthe's attack on her hair. "Father will never let Pylaster marry her. We're just humouring them to find out what they want."

"Aren't you just the chick who thinks she's the eagle. I suppose you have nothing left to learn from your tutors or your old nurse, do you?"

Helen was quiet then, but distracted herself from her embarrassment by chewing on her lip and thinking through a question that had been bothering her since yesterday.

"In Attolia…" she said at last, trying to guess at how her mother would phrase such a thought. "In the Attolian court, they never just say anything unless it means three other things. It's different here, but even here, I am not…no one would mistake me for a diplomat," she finally said, abandoning delicacy. "I just don't see why I'm supposed to be the right person to entertain the Attolian princess or find out anything useful from her. What does my father expect me to do, take her hunting and then ask her, 'Why are you here courting my brother instead of over the mountains seducing that vile bastard Sounis?'"

"Perhaps that is exactly what he expects." Xanthe chuckled and tapped Helen's shoulder, signalling her to turn around. In the mirror, Helen saw an unfamiliar young lady, her curls elaborately pinned to give the impression of long hair artfully styled. The touch of rouge on her cheeks somehow managed both to make her face look less baby-round and to distract the eye from her crooked nose. She was not beautiful, but she was, at least, polished.

She stared, and clung to the spark of anger that flared up in her chest, letting it chase away the far less welcome emotions. "This isn't what I look like," she said from between her teeth, glaring into the mirror.

"I know, darling," Xanthe said, not fooled, and kissed the top of her head, dislodging a pin and letting a curl tumble down over Helen's forehead. "But sometimes we have to pretend."

 

The two princesses went riding together. They walked in the gardens and attended plays and musical performances organised in honour of foreign envoy. At every turn, Helen expected the princess to ask about her brother, or about life in Eddis… _something_ that would show that this was more than just a diplomatic visit. But she did not. After two days of near-silence between them, their attendants at last took pity and began to chat among themselves, occasionally enticing one or the other of the princesses into the conversation. Once, memorably, one of Irene's attendants drew her out so far as to offer a comment on the play they'd just seen that was so insightful that Helen caught herself gaping for a moment, reeling with the recognition that this girl beside her was no mere shadow puppet but a princess who'd been raised in a very modern country, more connected to the outside world by far than Eddis.

And then, the next day, they began speaking to each other.

They were riding in the forest below the city, attended by a joint company of Eddisian and Attolian guards. The soldiers kept a greater distance from the girls than their attendants would have and did not attempt to converse with them, so when Irene pulled up her reins and whispered, "Look!" the exclamation could have only have been meant for Helen.

A stag was standing a little ways away in a clearing, watching them, one foot off the ground but otherwise at his ease.

"Oh," Irene murmured. "He's beautiful."

"Have you never seen a stag before?" Helen asked, forgetting to check the incredulity that crept into her tone.

Irene frowned, her face falling closed again. "Not a wild one."

They watched in silence as he ducked his head for another mouthful of grass. Helen looked over her shoulder; the guards had stopped several paces back, probably they'd seen the stag before the princesses did and fallen back so as not to alarm it. She glanced at Irene again, wondering if it would take another four days before she heard the girl speak freely again.

No sooner had she wondered, but Irene was asking, "Isn't it afraid of us?"

Helen shrugged. "Perhaps he knows it is not his time. And that we are not hunters."

"They can tell that?" Irene turned to face her fully, curiosity lighting up her dark eyes.

"Perhaps…" In her mind, there was simply a time to hunt deer and a time to watch them, and while she realised now that it was childish to assume that the deer knew those times as well, that's what she'd always done. "I don't know, I've never thought about it before." Helen shrugged again, glancing between the stag and Irene, wanting to watch her face to see how every line of it was affected by this sudden animation, but she did not feel comfortable letting her eyes linger.

Some noise at last startled the stag, and after a spell-bound moment where he seemed to hover between stillness and flight, he turned and disappeared into the shadows between the trees.

 

"You must help me, sister, I depend wholly on your counsel!" Pylaster pronounced in high dramatic tones, draping himself across Helen's bed.

"What do you want?" She frowned at him in the mirror, not moving out from under Xanthe's ministrations. She had not allowed her nurse to rouge her cheeks since that first night, but quietly submitted to the process of having her hair styled and changing into more elaborate dresses for dinner.

Sitting up, her brother said more seriously, "I have no idea what to say to princess Irene, we haven't spoken the last two nights at dinner and if tonight makes a third it will be unbearable. Everyone says you've been getting on well with her, what do you talk about? What does she like?"

"I thought you wanted to drive her away?" Helen asked, and something in her voice gave him pause.

"I do…I mean, I don't want to marry her, but I don't…"

"Perhaps his highness doesn't want to be seen as someone who cannot amuse a visiting princess?" Xanthe's voice was bland, and she didn't look up from her work.

Helen snorted. Pylaster blushed. "Fine. But if you're such good friends, maybe you should ask father to seat her next to you and spare me the annoyance of trying to make conversation with a blank wall."

Even if she had been inclined to answer her brother, Helen wouldn't have known what to say. She and Irene spoke, yes, but there was no magic key that would have unlocked the princess's lips for Pylaster. He only wanted to entertain the princess. Helen wanted to know Irene, to understand her and share some of herself as well, and still she could not tell what it was they found to talk about. On some mornings they sat to see a play or listen to poetry, and in the afternoon Irene might remark that she'd read that play or that poem last year and at several points the translations had differed; and then they would discuss language, speculating about the way a scholar would come to make a choice between this word and that. Or they would go walking and Helen would ask what flowers would be blooming in Attolia, and then they would hunt through the maze of Eddis's garden to find them, still in tight buds, waiting on the mountain country's later growing season. But there was silence, too. There was always silence between the words, and the words themselves did not come easily.  

 

Several days later, Pylaster's spiteful wish was granted. Their father went to sit at a council in a village partway down the mountain and he took Pylaster with him. At dinner that evening, Helen found herself seated next to Irene.

After the soup was served, Helen glanced to her left and saw Irene gazing down the length of the throne room. Helen loved this room, loved its reds and golds and the massive hearth, and she loved that it was the same room from which her father ruled his country. That he should govern his subjects and then break bread with them had always seemed to her to be akin to natural law; so important but so basic that she did not have words to speak of it.

"It is very different from Attolia," Irene said, without looking at her.

It was, Helen knew. In Attolia, the throne room housed the throne and the dining room was for dining; there, they had a room for every purpose as well as innumerable purposeless rooms, and in summertime, sunlight lingered in each of them well into the evening.

Picking up her spoon, turning it over to catch the candlelight, Helen asked softly, "Do you think you could be happy, here?"

Irene turned to look at her. "Oh, Helen," she said, using her name for the first time. "Do you think that it would matter?" For a moment only the mask cracked and Helen had a glimpse of something both desolate and fierce behind it.   

Helen watched Irene throughout the rest of dinner, bold now where previously she would have averted her eyes before they'd had their fill. When they stood to leave their places, Helen asked Irene to have breakfast with her in the morning. She went to bed that night thinking of wild deer penned in royal cages.

 

-*-

 

Irene sat in her litter, feeling each bump and sway of it as though the bearers were determined to trip over every stone and log on their way down the mountain; as if they could jostle Irene from her thoughts.

It was a mere three days since the Eddisian princess had invited Irene to join her for breakfast. Three mornings had come and now gone, each spent in Helen's private rooms where, after the servants withdrew, they had been alone together. Irene had been stunned, and then felt something akin to dismay, when she rose to leave on the first morning and discovered how much time had passed. She'd felt light-headed from giving such free rein to her long-disused voice.

Over the course of those three mornings they had spoken sometimes as princesses and neighbours and sometimes, miraculously, as girls.

This morning, something Helen told her had struck her as terribly funny and Irene had laughed aloud. The smile had still been on her face, and Helen's answering grin still brightening the room, when the door opened and a young serving boy slipped in holding a carafe. Irene could feel the boy's eyes on her but did not turn to look at him, watching Helen's face instead as her amusement turned to exasperation.

"Don't you want some more coffee?" the boy had asked, all innocence, seemingly in answer to a silent exchange between the two of them.

"Is it poisoned?" Helen retorted, and Irene had lifted one eyebrow.

After the boy had gone, Helen explained that he wasn't a serving boy at all but one of her young cousins who was fond of his pranks. Helen sounded fond as well, but Irene still waited several minutes after Helen drank from her refilled coffee cup before taking a sip herself. They resumed their conversation, but Irene could not recover her good humour. The joke about poison, the implicit trust that had allowed it to be a joke, and the very fact that this young imp could have arrived uninvited and unannounced into Helen's supposedly-private room without even a rebuke; it soured the air between them and Irene felt the shift in herself. Sitting a little taller, she was once again looking down at Helen, speaking to her in a manner more befitting their places; she the worldly elder instructing a naïve junior in the wretched ways of their world.

Helen, however, had been unwilling to hear her. Lifting a hand, she'd shaken her head, still smiling. "You're leaving so soon, can't we speak of nicer things?"

When they stood to part, Helen reached for Irene, pressing herself up on her toes to kiss her cheek. Irene had stood frozen, staring down at her, and watched as colour slowly rose in Helen's cheeks. Despite the blush, the girl looked, as she ever did, as solid and sturdy as the mountains she called home, and Irene wanted suddenly to know what it would take to see her crumble.

Holding Helen's chin pinched in her fingers, she'd tilted the girl's head up as she bent to kiss her lips.

At Helen's soft intake of breath, Irene took a step closer, tightening her already harsh grip. Helen's response had been to settle her hands lightly on Irene's waist, lips parting as she kissed her with her eyes closed.

Irene gasped as a particularly violent jolt shook the litter. The memory of that gentle touch was infuriating, and she tucked her hands into her sleeves, biting her nails into the delicate skin of her wrists. It didn't help.

Arriving home in Attolia, they were received with a bustle that had very little to do with her. Her father gave her a perfunctory greeting and then disappeared with all the advisors who had accompanied her. Even her attendant Phresine was called away, doubtless to give a report on the princess's behaviour and perhaps even to offer a woman's opinion of the Eddisian prince; what sort of man was he, was he a man at all or more rightly considered a boy? As she made her way up to her rooms, submitting impassively to a bath and a change of clothes, Irene thought about Pylaster for the first time since taking leave of him.

Would she be married to him? Would she be sent away to become Eddia Irene? Would she sit beside her husband at dinner each night, and would he allow her then to have breakfast each morning in her new sister's rooms?

She sent her attendants away, and sat looking at the slippers in her hands. They were blue velvet, embroidered with silver, and they were nicer than anything that Helen had.

When I am queen of Eddis, Irene thought, each word dropping like a pebble into still water, Helen will still be Helen. I will still be in chains, and she will be as free and as incorruptible as ever.

The scent of the hair oil reached her before the sound of the crash did, before she became aware that she was only holding one slipper. The amphora lay in pieces on the floor, and Irene stood staring at it until the knock came at her bedroom door.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoy my writing, I'd be thrilled if you'd take a minute to check out my original fiction. My first novel, 'Portrait of a Stranger,' is a sweet story of three chance encounters, two boys, and first love. Co-written with my fic-writing partner stardust_made, it will be released on December 26, 2018. You can order it [HERE](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KVLWHF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1543166018&sr=1-1&keywords=Portrait+of+a+Stranger).
> 
> The first few chapters are available to read [here on our blog](https://leboncanon.wordpress.com/). We appreciate the support of our fellow fanpeople!


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